My Introduction to Brown Bird: A Life-Changing Musical Experience

“That’s just the waves slamming against the topsides’ sound. Don’t let the ever-rolling motion go and get you down. Don’t let it shake your steady thread-cutting hand. Keep stealing ribbons from the steel and giving hell.”

I didn’t want to go. I was coerced. All I wanted was to stay home and be antisocial. At least that was the case on this particular night. Jeanne practically begged me—or maybe demanded is more accurate. She didn’t want to go alone. I wasn’t her only option, but we were dating, and music was one of the threads holding us together.

Neither of us had heard of the band. They were touring to promote their new album Salt for Salt. I’m not sure where Jeanne heard about them, probably Alex De Vore’s column in The Recorder. She said, “It was a show we couldn’t miss.” “…passing on Brown Bird,” she said, “would be like having an $18 ticket to Woodstock, and choosing to stay home to watch Let’s Make a Deal.”

The show was at High Mayhem, a recording studio tucked into the quietest corners of Santa Fe, New Mexico. When we arrived, a few people were sitting around a fire outside. Between the two of us, we recognized maybe a handful of faces. The members of Cloacas were there—they’d recorded at High Mayhem. I was at least acquainted with them. As people started herding inside, Jeanne and I followed. We found a seat on a swing hanging twenty feet from the ceiling, wide enough only for the two of us. Bean bag chairs, stools, carpets, blankets, and benches were scattered around the studio. In front of us, tuning and fiddling with a variety of instruments, were three unfamiliar faces: David Lamb, MorganEve Swain, and her cousin, whose name I can’t recall. He only toured with them occasionally. David and MorganEve were Brown Bird.

“I tried to be good; I was a failure. So, I took to taking all the good men down. It wasn’t hard to do, I just huffed and puffed and blew until all the two shoes scattered underground.”

David played guitar, banjo, and drums—sometimes simultaneously. He wrote most of the band’s music, and MorganEve, David’s wife, played fiddle and cello. They opened with “Fingers to the Bone,” the first track off Salt for Salt. Before the song ended, I knew staying home would’ve been a costly mistake. Brown Bird instantly became my favorite band. And they’ve remained so, even after David Lamb passed from leukemia on April 5, 2014.

That night changed everything I thought I knew about music. I genuinely felt like I was hearing sound for the first time. And for someone whose life has been shaped by music since birth, that was a big deal. Salt for Salt is a blistering, spiritual folk album—recorded live to tape, stripped of commercial gloss, and packed with lyrical force. It’s a record that rages darkly, expressing the eternal human battle to remain relevant through conflict and challenge. Lamb’s voice is honey and thunder. The arrangements—banjo, cello, bass drum, fiddle—merge folk, blues, and gypsy-punk into something haunting and elemental.

“Bilgewater” might be the album’s most original work of folk gold: “When every day is like a war between the will to go on and a wish that the world would spiral into the sun / Turn your head toward the storm that’s surely coming along.” It’s hard to top that line for sheer force of will. But the album is full of moments like that—songs that feel like spells, like warnings, and like whispered truths.

Brown Bird’s music was never about polish. It was about pulse. About grit. About the kind of storytelling that doesn’t ask for permission. Salt for Salt is one of those rare albums that reward close listening and repeated plays. It doesn’t just hold up—it deepens. David Lamb and MorganEve Swain didn’t just make music; they created a world. And for one night, in a swing suspended from the ceiling of a Santa Fe studio, I got to live in it.